Though there’s an industry built on telling you otherwise, there are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you’ll acquire a guest room. Some people get one by default when their kids leave home, and others, like me, eventually trade up, and land a bigger house. “Follow me,” I now say. The room I lead our visitors to has not been hastily rearranged to accommodate them. It does not double as an office or a weaving nook but exists for only one purpose. I have furnished it with a bed rather than a fold-out sofa, and against one wall, just as in a hotel, I’ve placed a luggage rack. The best feature, though, is the private bathroom.
“If you prefer a shower to a tub, I can put you upstairs in the second guest room,” I say. “There’s a luggage rack up there as well.” I hear these words coming from my puppet-lined mouth and shiver with middle-aged satisfaction. Yes, my hair is gray and thinning. Yes, the washer on my penis has worn out, leaving me to dribble urine long after I’ve zipped my trousers back up. But I have two guest rooms.
Do you have a guest room?
Apt. 11d 
Our guest room is also our office. And I’m in the middle of painting it, so it isn’t very nice right now.
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We may eventually turn the separate upstairs room into a guest room. When the building was built, it was a serving-girl’s room.
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We have a tiny guest room. We have two extra attic rooms with low ceilings that are in the middle of being remodeled. As soon as they’re done, we could potentially have 3 guest rooms! They’re each about 7 x 9, so tiny.
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No! We bought a bigger house, but not one with a guest room. We have an office that we could turn into a guest room if necessary. There is a bathroom attached, but the bathroom also opens into the kitchen.
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Yes, but in a basement (daylight, though, and with a view, so most people don’t complain). But, we use it as storage space, so it’s never so clear that one could bring anyone there and just settle them down. But, there are real beds, and the rooms are not regularly used for any other purpose, and there are two, with a bathroom, and separated from our bedrooms (on the 2nd floor).
They’re waiting for you, Laura, too, if you ever come to our neck of the woods.
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I do have the fantasy of having the guest rooms set up so that guests could stay there at any moment. It is a completely achievable goal, if I could only manage to get rid of the masses of things we continue to have and acquire. For example, the barbie doll house my kiddo still has and will really never use again needs to find a new home.
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Maybe MH’s place?
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Luggage racks are fabulous. We use them all the time, to unload laundry, and load suitcases (we travel a fair amount). Need to get some for the guest rooms — the ones I bought originally have traveled to our closet.
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I do, and as of a year ago it has a regular queen-sized bed in it. When I lived in a townhouse apartment I had a futon on the floor of the guest room – perfectly comfortable, but not suitable for parents or others their age, so I’d sleep on it when they visited. But last year when I got a house I bought a new bed and now I feel like a real adult. I’ll have to get a luggage rack.
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yes, we have a home office and a dedicated guest room with an ensuite. It was a huge priority for us when we moved to this house because most of our family has to fly to visit. Luggage rack is something I’m going to google right now.
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Ha, do you realize how this topic is related to the book post below? If I could get the books out of the extra room, I could set it up as a great guest room! We are sorting the books into “keep on display,” “give away,” and “pack away” (for the kids when they move out, or grandkids, or whoever; I refuse to believe that physical books will become obsolete).
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I have a home office with room to set up the air mattress, but no dedicated guest room. I guess I don’t really want one. There is something very decadent about a room that is only used occasionally.
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Sadly, no guest room. Also no office. So when Eldest eventually moves out for real, her room will get to serve double duty. There’s also no dedicated bathroom for a guest. What kind of crazy affluence do people expect?
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Well, personally, when I stay with friends and family I expect my own guest cottage with room service and daily housekeeping (oh, and turn down service).
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“What kind of crazy affluence do people expect?”
It’s not ridiculous for empty nesters to be able to turn a child’s bedroom into a guest bedroom. It is kind of opulent for people raising children to have an unused guest bedroom, though.
We just moved from a 1680 sq. ft. duplex into a 2900 sq. ft. two story house. Despite the superfluity of square footage in the new place, we are still somehow short two rooms: an office for my husband and a guest bedroom. The new place has three bedrooms each with an en suite bath plus a nursery (no bath, no closets, lots of built-ins–it was the previous owner’s office). My husband has set up an office in a corner of the master bedroom–not ideal, but much preferable to having our 10-year-old girl (who has had her own bedroom for the past 9 years) share a bedroom with Baby T. I know that there’s a whole kids-today-are-so-spoiled vibe about each of the kids having their own room, but they are so widely spaced and various in gender that it makes more sense for us (the 10-year-old has many hobbies involving sharp and chokable objects).
Ever since we moved to Texas (which coincided with the death of the fold-out mechanism of our sofabed), we’ve been having grandmas and grandpas stay at a hotel during their rare visits. It is a bit ridiculous now that we have such a large home, but it’s still the case that we can only offer 1) an air mattress in a child’s room or 2) the sofa (no longer a sofabed) or 3) a hotel room.
I guess we do have a guest room–it just happens to be located a couple miles away.
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Congrats on the new house.
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Thanks! We haven’t quite bought it yet. We’re currently living it as renters, but should close very soon. We were supposed to close early last week, the paperwork got delayed, we’re supposed to sign our paperwork this week and I expect our sellers will be able to sign next week (they left town about a week and a half ago).
It’s a good thing our sellers are being so flexible about the closing date, as our lease was up May 25.
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Yes, congrats from the Apt. 11d clan!
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Even though the place I live in now has a bedroom that no one uses as that, it’s not really a guest room- it’s our TV/sewing room, with only a strange sort of IKEA flip-out couch thing that I bought mostly because I needed somewhere to sleep in the week before my furniture showed up after I last moved. If I had a real guest room, I’d be more likely to not feel lightly put upon when my parents came to visit, as they will next week. Or maybe not. When I go to see them, I see that my old room has been turned into a guest room. It’s much nicer now then when I lived in it. (The room hadn’t been finished when my parents bought the house, and was only semi-finished when I was moved into it. It’s finished now. That wasn’t necessarily unreasonable on my parent’s part.)
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